So Basically I'm Batman

I've always flattered myself my thinking I'm psychically sound enough to not be hit too hard by homesickness. I spent all eighteen years of my life in the same town, with very few excursions elsewhere lasting longer than a few days. I figured once I left the sentimentality of it would quickly fade and I'd realize that Amherst doesn't really offer anything that Cambridge, among other places, doesn't offer in excess.

When I first got here I went down the list of the things that were most precious to me back home. I found street musicians, a kickass burrito place, drugged-out slackers with dreams of revolution, several pretty places to run, trees to climb (albeit illegally), and plenty of dark-haired, doe-eyed virgins with low alcohol tolerance who dream of writing their coming-of-age novels and moving to a third world country to help orphans. I think somewhere in the mix I even found some people who could become very good friends.

But you know what I didn't find?

Love.

But you know what I didn't find, and I actually wish I had?

Antonio's.

Cambridge needs a friggin' Antonio's. They've got a Pinnochio's, incidentally, and it's actually the original from which the shady Amherst chapter was spawned. The drunk kids around here call it 'Noc's, and the fruity kids call it Pinnoc's, probably because that sounds more like penis.

I like to keep an open mind when it comes to pizzerias, so last week I got rip-roaring drunk and wandered down the dark streets of Cambridge in hopes of locating a distant choir of screams that could only mean deliciousness. As I walked I contemplated what rip-roaring drunk actually meant. I decided it was sort of like Enlightenment, in that some Zen asshole just made it up because he wanted an excuse not to get a real job. Of course, when I was thinking this, I was rip-roaring drunk. So I still really don't know what it means.

Deep in the throes of this internal debate I somehow managed to almost get run over by a moped. The driver was an elderly woman with a ponytail, wearing a pink helmet and a leather jacket. She swore profusely at me and I made fun of her for being blind. Shortly after the two of us went on our merry ways I heard a massive crash behind me. I turned to find the old hag sprawled out face down on the sidewalk. Her moped had managed to lodge itself in the metal grating of a closed tobacco shop. I ran over to her and tried to pry her off the ground. She shook me off. "I can do it myself, you fucking fuckers!" she said sagely. And then, with a eloquent cough that seemed to fill a thousand blissful years, she cooed, "Actually, young man, I don't think I can walk."

I laughed at her ruse and challenged her to an arm wrestle. She turned me down, clearly fearful of my undeniable man-essence. I didn't really want to arm-wrestle her, anyway. I figured since she was so old she was probably going to die soon, anyway, so I might as well make her feel as if she isn't totally inferior in her last moments. Like in all those baseball movies where the kid meets his favorite player and tosses his historic home-run ball back to him, so he can have it as his own keepsake, and then the big star says, "Wow, champ, that's a heckuva arm ya got there!" Or some shit like that. And the kid really appreciates that because his father was a deadbeat or a Nazi and never gave him any positive reinforcement, and the kid probably also has cancer or something. I don't know if there's ever been a movie like that, but if so, it totally sucked ass.

So while she was lying there, dying like the champ that she wasn't, I figured I'd go find some pizza for the two of us. But I realized if I went all the way to the nearest pizza place, which could be millions of miles away, and then all the way back, the pizza would be cold and covered in my drool, and my drool would be equally cold. Plus, I really didn't want to walk all the way back here before turning in for the night. So naturally I lifted up this old woman and threw her over my shoulder like a large straw dummy meticulously fashioned after an old woman. At first she was all like, "Hey, what are you doing? Where are you bringing me?" But she knew. She was just playing the Old-Person-with-Alzheimer's Card and pretending to forget everything. I decided to one-up her by telling her we were going to the Kingdom of Heaven and that I was the Angel of Death. She got really quiet after that, and pretty soon I forgot I was carrying her.

After a half dozen blocks I was getting really tired, party because I'm out of shape, but mostly because I was carrying an old woman and didn't realize it. So I decided to stop in at one of the 362 CVS stores in Cambridge and buy some smokes. I get in there and this short black guy behind the counter is just sort of shaking his head like he's listening to some crazy music that nobody else can hear.

He looked up and his eyes went all bugged-out on me and I figured he must be reacting to the fumes of drugs he ignited and inhaled before I came in. He started mumbling, something to the effect of, "Excuse me, sir, but I thought I might inform you that you are carrying the limp and unconscious body of an elderly female, and given that this is a convenience store and not the emergency room of a hospital, I would posit further that your presence here is inappropriate to the point of being profane."

I asked him why he did not have any American Spirits behind the counter. He shrugged his shoulders and said that Camels were all right.

"All right?" I screamed. "You think Camels are all right?"

The next thing I knew I was foaming at the mouth, and it tasted like Sour Cream and Onion. I knew something bad was about to happen, so I beckoned to the man behind the counter. He seemed confused, and intimated to me that he did not want to come any closer to me, and besides if he did he would be unable, on account of the persistently solid counter affixed to the floor between us.

Something inside me died in that moment, and I once I came to the clear truth of it all: all of us - me, the CVS man, the old woman, me, Bruce Springsteen, Sour Cream and Onion, me, Batman, and even I myself were all simply swirling around in an amoral universe like motes of dust in a dusty dustbowl. Nothing I did mattered. Soon I would die and it would all be oblivion, and then I would be dead for the rest of my life.

The woman on my shoulders announced her presence with a gentle purr, which evolved into projectile vomit, bile intermingled with blood. Suddenly I knew what I had to do.

"Do you know why we bury our dead, laddie?" I intoned to the drugged Mister in the blue CVS shit.

He looked at me as if he had been dealing with the customer behind me for the past several minutes.

With an explosion of force the likes of which I had never before experienced outside of James Cameron films, I hurled the old woman at the drug-man. She spun around several times, a ballerina on a horizontal axis, before striking him directly all over his body. The two of them fell against the wall of cigarettes in a highly poetical heap. Tobacco products lay scattered across them like body glitter on a body, a body that was the floor.

Immediately several people started cheering hysterically, lost for all sensible words. The screamed for help, frustrated that they could not find a camera in order to preserve this image of justice forever. I strode over to them and placed a hand on each of their shoulders in turn.

"Do not worry, my peerless children. I am that is. A destroyer of worlds. Tobacco products are carcinogenic, and cancer is the light of lights."

And with that I disappeared into the night, leaving all to wonder what had happened to what they once called their lives.